Mark Millar On Starlight Comic Book Movie

IGN recently interviewed comic book legend Mark Millar, Civil War, Kick-Ass, to discuss Kingsman: The Secret Service, when they also decided to pick his brain on one of his comics soon to hit the silver screen, Starlight. IGN through out some suggestions and ideas on who could play the character’s lead role, Duke McQueen. IGN’s list of suggested actors varied from Liam Neeson to Kirk Douglas, which Millar commented on in his point of view.

Millar also went on to talk about his inspiration for the story saying:

“When I was a kid my Dad used to have this old 35mm projector and we had a lot of the Republic serials – things like Flash Gordon and Commando Cody. I grew up with a real love of that – I must have been the only kid on my housing estate in Scotland that was really into this stuff. BBC2 were showing a lot of that stuff at the time too. So I grew up really loving 1930s and 1940s serials.

“I wanted to do a comic book that was an homage to that stuff. So what I did was I took the archetypes of the space hero – a John Carter, Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon-style space hero – and aged him up. This guy had been doing these amazing things when he was in his 20s; he had these amazing adventures, like Buster Crabbe. But when he came back to earth there was no evidence that he’d done anything. The idea was that he comes back and has to live a normal life. He’s like ‘I saved that alien world!’ and people are like ‘Very good.’ There were no selfies then so you couldn’t really prove it!

“So he just comes home, becomes a mechanic, gets married and has kids. And then he doesn’t tell people about it anymore because he’s kind of embarrassed because nobody believes him. Then his wife dies and his kids move out of the house… and he’s a 63-year-old guy. Then one of those old sparkly rocket ships lands in the garden again and says ‘You saved us 40 years ago, will you come back and save us again because there’s a new problem?’ And he has to squeeze himself into his old spacesuit and has to go back for one last adventure. It’s kind of Unforgiven meets Flash Gordon.”

The screenplay isn’t even written at this stage, but we nevertheless took the opportunity to lob some names at Mark for Duke McQueen, kicking off with the actor that apparently inspired the look of the character…"

Let us know what you think about Millar’s Starlight comic coming to film in the comments down below!!